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the expression of their personalities, and so it was thought Shakespeare
was accusing them, and telling us to be careful lest we deserve the like
accusations. It did not occur to the critics that you cannot know a man
from his actions, because you cannot watch him in every kind of
circumstance, and that men are made useless to the State as often by
abundance as by emptiness, and that a man's business may at times be
revelation, and not reformation. Fortinbras was, it is likely enough, a
better King than Hamlet would have been, Aufidius was a more reasonable
man than Coriolanus, Henry V. was a better man-at-arms than Richard II.,
but after all, were not those others who changed nothing for the better
and many things for the worse greater in the Divine Hierarchies? Blake
has said that 'the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of
the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of Eternity, too
great for the eye of man,' but Blake belonged by right to the ages of
Faith, and thought the State of less moment than the Divine Hierarchies.
Because reason can only discover completely the use of those obvious
actions which everybody admires, and because every character was to be
judged by efficiency in action, Shakespearian criticism became a vulgar
worshipper of Success. I have turned over many books in the library at
Stratford-on-Avon, and I have found in nearly all an antithesis, which
grew in clearness and violence as the century grew older, between two
types, whose representatives were Richard II., 'sentimental,' 'weak,'
'selfish,' 'insincere,' and Henry V., 'Shakespeare's only hero.' These
books took the same delight in abasing Richard II. that school-boys do in
persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who has weak muscles and a
distaste for school games. And they had the admiration for Henry V. that
school-boys have for the sailor or soldier hero of a romance in some boys'
paper. I cannot claim any minute knowledge of these books, but I think
that these emotions began among the German critics, who perhaps saw
something French and Latin in Richard II., and I know that Professor
Dowden, whose book I once read carefully, first made these emotions
eloquent and plausible. He lived in Ireland, where everything has failed,
and he meditated frequently upon the perfection of character which had, he
thought, made England successful, for, as we say, 'cows beyond the water
have long horns.' He forgot that Englan